


The Little Country House

by beckettemory



Series: Sticks and Stones [1]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Home, Secrets, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7847116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beckettemory/pseuds/beckettemory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can tell a lot about someone by looking through their stuff, which is why Eliot keeps all of his secrets in a house outside Portland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Little Country House

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for death, suicidal ideation, food, knives, slight paranoia, animal neglect (in the past by other people), religion, injury, and child abuse, and references to child death
> 
> spoilers for the end of season 5

They don’t know about Eliot’s little house outside Portland. They know he has an apartment downtown with some clothes and workout equipment and a gourmet kitchen but little else, no art on the walls, no keepsakes, and only a few books. They just figure he always packs light, even when moving.

They know that sometimes when they show up at his apartment to surprise him for a night out or to drag him to a con briefing when they can’t get ahold of him, he’s not there. Then, they just figure he’s out saving the world or something and couldn’t tell them.

Nate knows that you can understand a person by looking at their house, their bedroom, by poking around inside their medicine cabinets and junk drawers. The others, too. And Hardison, if he was _really_ curious, could probably find the little country house in five minutes flat with his super-spy-hacking skills or whatever. But he doesn’t, because he’s busy with whatever Hardison does when he’s not working on a con. Probably building more aliases for them with increasingly nerdy names or building a robot to teach Parker about feelings.

If the team were to find the little country house, though, the first thing they’d notice is the fence running all the way around the property behind the house, so Eliot can step out the back door directly into the small pasture and go feed his horses. He has two horses, Bonnie and Gambit. Gambit he bought from Aimee’s father just after he bought the little house, and Bonnie he stole from his own father in Oklahoma. Bonnie is getting older; she was his horse, bought with his birthday money when he turned sixteen, and left in that putrid stable at his father’s house when Eliot left. When he stole her back, she was fourteen and deathly skinny, afraid of everything and covered in fleas. She was so sick the vet who looked after her when she was rescued said she might not regain sight in her left eye. She's doing much better now, putting on weight and slowly gaining eyesight and trust in humans.

They might see Beate, a big mutt with the bone structure of a wolfhound, running around with Gambit and Bonnie. She’s a good dog; he didn’t even have to train her to stay inside the fence even though she could get through it in three seconds flat. She keeps the horses safe and gives Bonnie a friend when she doesn’t trust humans or Gambit; they’re inseparable. When she comes inside with him she thinks she’s a lapdog, and he doesn’t argue; she sleeps in his bed with him, sometimes laying her big scruffy head on his stomach and licking his face to wake him up in the morning.

He has a farmhand, Cody, who watches his horses and Beate when he’s “away on business”. He’ll tell Cody what he really does eventually. He’s a good kid; he’s trying to make it on his own after leaving an abusive home at fifteen, and Eliot is teaching him how to fight and how to cook. If you can cook, you can go anywhere and get work, and when you’re a scrawny farmhand, being able to look after yourself and defend yourself is important. He just doesn’t want to turn Cody into another version of him, so he discourages military service. No one wants another Eliot Spencer.

The little house is unassuming from the outside. When Hardison had given the tiniest hint that Portland would be their next stop, Eliot had flown there and spent three weeks scouring the neighboring towns for a plot of land he could put a house and a couple horses on. He found what he was looking for in Damascus, a tiny community that wasn’t even incorporated anymore. Its name made him laugh. He took the house that was already on the property and gutted it, even tearing out walls where he wanted. The result is like walking into a house that looks like all the others on the street and finding yourself in a high-end modern apartment in New York City. He’d done all the renovations himself, laying down dark hardwood floors and adding light-colored chair rails and crown molding to rooms painted dark colors. He’d done all the decorating himself too, from the rug under the small dining table to the framed vintage movie posters in the gym. Years of secrecy had left him unable to relinquish control of his house even temporarily to an interior designer. What could they do that he couldn’t, anyway? Not much. 

If they walked into the house not knowing who lived there they couldn’t guess. The house they would see wouldn’t reflect the Eliot they knew until they snooped in the closet or pulled open the bedside drawer or found the wall safe behind the bed, but they wouldn’t. The house they would see reflected the Eliot no one knows, who appreciates the finer things in life, but quietly; who has been working on his bachelors degree online for six years in his spare time; who longs to be a father but is terrified of making it a reality; who prefers solitude not because he likes it, but because he's afraid of hurting the people he cares about.

Just inside the door they’d see a muddy welcome mat, with at least one pair of work boots resting on top to keep the floors clean, and they wouldn’t recognize his shoes because they're different than the ones they see him wearing, and a small wooden door the size of a wall safe above the small table next to the coat rack, and Hardison would recognize the system because he had installed it in a house Eliot was "fixing up for a friend", and then Hardison would recognize the house. He still wouldn’t know whose house it was, because Hardison is a man who trusts his friends unconditionally and doesn’t hear their lies unless they are bad liars like Parker.

In the kitchen they’d find all the trappings of a professional chef at home, with high quality knives and a professional-grade stovetop and pots and pans worn from so much use. They’d see that the kitchen window overlooks a vegetable garden that holds, at first glance, at least ten kinds of vegetables and fruits and at least five kinds of herbs. On the windowsill are several seedlings growing in mugs, and Parker would think that was cute and want to take one. Held up by magnets on the fridge are crayon drawings done by his kids in the Boys and Girls Club he volunteers in, and maybe Parker would recognize those, because she had followed him there one day.

They would find hints as to the owner of the house everywhere but wouldn’t piece it all together, wouldn’t look close enough; the baseball bat resting against the table in the entryway; the books written in Farsi and Russian and Mandarin and German in addition to English books on the shelves in the bedroom and living room; the sheer number of worn pocket knives in the junk drawer in the kitchen; the coils of chains (just in case) in the cellar right next to the fishing gear; the lack of any guns anywhere in the house where they would expect several, hidden away in lockboxes or displayed proudly on the mantle; a photo of a young woman with Eliot’s eyes and a man without, framed and resting on the small table next to the sofa; an acoustic guitar on a stand near the back door; no television in sight.

The house is small, but not as small as his apartment in the city. It has a big kitchen, a living room with a breakfast nook, a bedroom, a bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a small gym, with a wraparound porch like he’s always wanted and a cellar below the house, plus a small stable with two box stalls. It’s not wired with explosives like Parker’s warehouse or the gastropub. If he needed to get away quick he would risk coming here once before disappearing, to gather just a handful of things and make arrangements for his animals, to say goodbye to his safe space. It’s how he’s kept ahold of so many important things through moving from city to city; when he’s relocating for good he packs two bags, one with clothes, one with keepsakes and spare passports.

The cellar holds supplies for his garden and his horses, as well as his fishing and camping gear. It holds all the tools he needs to keep his home functioning, and extra ropes and chains should he need to restrain someone. There’s also a corner for planning for the future: cans of paint in pastel colors, to choose from later, a crib, unassembled and waiting in its box, a handful of books on parenting he hasn’t let himself read yet, drawings of his little gym turned into a nursery.

The bedroom is pretty unassuming, its walls dark and its carpets light, with dark wood furniture and gray bedding. It looks like the bedroom of a studious young confirmed bachelor, with a bookshelf and a comfy reading chair with a chunky throw blanket resting on its ottoman. On the wall above the bed is a large gray scale photograph of a landscape, and he knows that it is of the hill behind his childhood home, because he’d taken the picture himself in high school. There’s a wall safe behind the headboard that holds his spare passports, all the ones he uses on the run, not the ones he uses for cons. Clean identities ready for a getaway.

A small rough hewn cross hangs on the wall in his bedroom, a reminder of the faith he used to feel but couldn’t entirely shake. Some things you can’t completely forget. _I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth…_

In the drawer of the bedside table is a surprise: a button that locks down the wall safe in the entryway and the kitchen knives into their block. When he comes home every day he puts all his weapons in the box like he’s just setting his keys on the hook or toeing off his shoes next to the door. Then, if in the middle of the night he starts hating himself even more, if he feels like he will hurt himself if he gets out of bed, all he needs to do is hit the button inside his bedside table and know that his easiest way out is out of his reach and can’t be accessed again til dawn. In the morning it’s a three step procedure to open the safe or get his knives out of the block, and that’s enough to keep him alive. He doesn’t worry about protection while his knives are locked away, though, because he keeps a baseball bat or other bludgeon in every room, and he could defend himself with virtually anything else in his house if he needed to. He is his own worst enemy and greatest fear, and sometimes he needs his options for killing himself limited to feel safe while alone.

His bed is comfy, though he doesn’t spend much time sleeping in it. When he told the crew that he sleeps only ninety minutes a day, he wasn’t lying. He was just omitting the reason and letting them think that “I grow all my own food” was the reason he didn’t sleep and not the result of not sleeping. And some nights he does sleep well, usually when Beate clambers entirely on top of him and refuses to budge so all he can do is sleep or lie awake thinking and petting her. The pressure of Beate on top of him plus knowing that she trusts and believes in him is often enough to calm his self-hatred and let him get some sleep, and the nights he can spend at his little country house in Damascus are the nights he can sometimes catch up on his sleep.

Even still, there are nights quite often when he lays awake for hours, tossing and turning with gunfire in his ears and flashes of heat across his face and guilt in his heart and hate in his mind and not even Beate or thoughts of his friends can calm him. Those are the nights his knives get locked away. Those are the nights he gets caught up on his schoolwork, because he had found an online school with flexible deadlines and understanding professors and accommodations for his PTSD. Those are the nights that his vegetable garden gets weeded, loud music playing through his headphones and a floodlamp on a tripod lighting his patch of dirt. Those are the nights he teaches himself new languages or reads in the ones he already knows, _Scheherazade_ in original Farsi or Gogol in original Russian. Those are the nights the house gets cleaned, the floors mopped, the bathtub scrubbed, the carpets vacuumed, Beate cowering under the dining table, because a clean house and a clean conscience seem to go together, even though it has never worked before, but maybe one of these days it will.

His closet holds his most treasured items, but they’re tucked away so any guests he has won’t just see them out and about. He doesn’t have many guests at all, but just in case he keeps the items closest to his heart in dresser drawers and in the pockets of unused jackets.

He has one dresser for his own clothes, and another, larger one for clothes he wears on cons: t-shirts and pajama pants and Hawaiian shirts and brightly colored clothes of every style that he would never wear himself, and he packs bags before every con to take back to his city apartment. A third dresser is smaller, more personal: gifts from lovers past and friends present, things left behind by one night stands he wanted to turn into something more, keepsakes from his childhood he’d stolen back or kept hidden all these years.

There’s a brass figurine of an eagle from his first boyfriend, a kid he was in special ops with. They were done by the time they started dating, but the kid, Bennett, had died a month into their relationship. He had been twenty-one, Eliot twenty-four.

There’s an old Bible with a cracked leather cover and worn pages, owned by his maternal grandfather’s family and several generations prior. Inside the cover is a list of his entire family on that side, each person born into the family or married in, their birth dates, their death dates. He has filled in too many death dates next to the names in his generation.

There’s a leather wrist cuff from the neurologist, Andrea, he had dated, and a set of silver cufflinks from the flight attendant, Levi. The crew assumed all of the people he mentioned having dated were women, while only some of them actually were. He doesn't correct them. It is easier this way.

There’s a stack of cards and drawings held together with twine from his niece Hannah and nephew Chris. On the bottom of the stack is a folded piece of paper he tries to forget: the program from Marie, his sister's, funeral, mailed to him by their other sister. Tucked inside the program is a paper napkin from the reception with his brother-in-law’s phone number in case he ever wanted to talk to the kids. He hadn’t in several years. Hannah would be in fourth grade by now, and Chris wouldn’t be far behind. He wonders if they would even remember him.

There’s a harness hanging in his closet, custom built for him by Parker, given as a Christmas gift one year. He’s never had to use it, but figures it’s something he should keep around just in case. He’s secretly a sentimental fool, anyway, and can’t bear to part with it.

There’s a birthday card from Sophie, telling him her real name and offering him one favor, redeemable anytime, as a birthday gift. The card had come with one of the baseball bats he kept in the house, sometime after the con where he became a baseball star with a sandwich named after his alias, after Nate betrayed them and they spent several months as a crew of four. 

There’s a small chess set from Hardison, purchased after the chess competition as a get well present. While he recovered from the beating he took, he and Hardison played game after game in the Boston headquarters. They had been friends before, but those couple of days in that apartment were when they became brothers. 

In the bottom drawer of the dresser, taking up nearly the whole thing, is Nate’s gift. A week after Nate left the crew with Sophie in tow Eliot had found a box just inside the door of his city apartment. Inside was a battered old trumpet. He wasn’t one to cry, but that day he sat on the floor of his apartment and wept.

If the crew were to find the country house, they wouldn’t know who lived there unless they happened upon Eliot in his garden or kitchen or tossing and turning in bed, and maybe it’s good that they don’t know about the house. Maybe it’s good that they don’t know all the sides of him he’s kept secret. Maybe, if they knew, they would leave him. Maybe they would stop feeling safe around him if they knew how unsafe he felt in his own skin.

But maybe… Maybe it’s time someone knows the real him. 

**Author's Note:**

> edited to fix the tense throughout, to be canon accurate in some places after a rewatch, and in a couple spots to be accurate to a story i'm working on now


End file.
